Course Description

This course explores relations between states and international markets in the modern era. Drawing on
economic history and the history of international relations, we will study three waves of globalization:
European imperialism’s adaptation to the doctrine of free trade in the nineteenth century; the U.S.-
led construction of new international organizations in the first half of the twentieth century; and the
great transformation of the 1970s. The geographic focus will largely be on states in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, as a key theme will be the ways in which diplomacy and interstate competition defined
the processes of inclusion and exclusion that created global markets. We will take up, for example,
stories of extraterritorial rights regimes, sanctions, and the exceptions written into institutions
ostensibly based on equal and sovereign states. Rather than telling a story of triumph and backlash,
this course examines longer histories of hegemonic ambition and counterhegemonic resistance; in
doing so, it invites reflection on the precedents for the current contestation of the terms of
global capitalism.